Document Management Blog | MES

How Scan to Zero will Safely Clear Out Your Filing Cabinets

Written by Mike Lynett | Jun 21, 2017 3:00:00 PM


Whether you’re relatively new to the office-based business, or have been stacking up numerous files for decades, converting your paper to digital files using scan to zero has a host of invaluable benefits. In fact; this type of conversion has been getting more popular in the past half-decade, as business owners appreciate the huge reduction in storage space, cost-savings and other attributes exclusive to this method.

Increase Office Productivity with Scan to Zero

First, the most obvious benefit: by scanning documents into the digital realm, you cut down the amount of time and effort required to search them for specific information. In fact, a standard metric across the board is that nearly 8% of paper documents are filed incorrectly, or outright lost. The scan to zero methodology, of course, eliminates these issues. A simple search function can locate any string of data, so that once your files are entered correctly, you may never lose them again.

Loss-Protection and Savings

With your files now in the digital medium, you need not worry about losing them – no matter how far back they date. When you were keeping physical files, you were quite aware of the increasing need for space to keep decades-old docs; now, it can take you years just to need another hard drive. If you choose cloud storage with scan to zero, you may not need any drives at all!

Another aspect of the scan to zero methodology is the inherent cost-savings in the tiered offering. Many vendors offer fixed monthly payments, so that you can avoid a one-time fee for converting megabytes of data at once. This allows companies from the SMB to the multinational corporation to take advantage of document scanning, and not be restricted by their respective budgets.

A Few of the Safeguards Available

It’s straightforward to acquire auxiliary services along with your document scanning platform. Things like password protection and encryption ensure that higher-level employees/managers can access it exclusively, so that responsibility is easy to assign. Too much access could end up in accidental (or even purposeful) erasures and degradation of data. You should implement a safety policy nonetheless, and have an audit trail function built into the system.

With business continuity and disaster recovery – which should be features of any business in this digital age – you won’t need to concern yourself with office fires, misplaced documents or tampering. Since the physical footprint of your documents is now so very small, you can have redundancies in different locations or on virtual servers on the cloud if you decide the monthly fees are worth it.

The Document Storage Mechanism of the Future

Frankly, the future is now. Scan to zero will usher in the new age of competitive storage options, and with a low monthly fee option, can have you well on the way to clearing out those file cabinets once and for all. No more overtime for months at a time, as your employees clear out years of data and move it to an expanding office space for storage. Digital places everything you could ever want to do with your files at your fingertips, and the savings you experience will continue to accumulate as a result as the years go by.